The Shape in the Sky

Dear Diary,
​Last night, I saw a UFO.

​That is, I saw an unidentified flying object, but I’m not ready to call in the ufologists just yet. It was pretty strange, though.

​I was woken by a low hum, like all my neighbors had turned on their generators at the same time. I was too tired to care; it didn’t sound like something about to blow up, so I tried to fall back asleep. Tried. But the hum didn’t fade into the background with my alarm clock’s ticking. Instead, it got louder and louder, until it became an oscillating screech.

​It was driving me crazy. I got up and opened the curtains to see what it was. The streetlight revealed quiet houses and empty roads. The sky was clear and bright. Very bright. An oblong bar of light blazed amongst the stars and pulsed in time with the sound. It burned my eyes, but I couldn’t look away.

​Though at first it seemed fixed in place, I realized it was inching across the sky. I watched it until it disappeared over the horizon. Its afterimage lingered in front of me. By then, I was exhausted. I mused about what it might have been until sleep embraced me.

​Now I still see multicolored spots in front of my eyes. I guess it serves me right for staring at the thing so long.

#

Dear Diary,
​These spots are annoying.

​When I woke up and still saw them, I worried I’d damaged my eyes. I went to the eye doctor, but he couldn’t find anything wrong. He said he’d call in a few days.

​Sometimes, the spots start to reassemble into the shape of the light, but when I blink, they separate again.

#

Dear Diary,
​The spots make it hard to focus on anything else, so I play with them to pass the time. Reds and blues and greens—always shifting and changing! I even dream about them. They get closer and closer, until the shape is almost complete—then I wake up. If I go a long time without blinking, maybe I’ll see the shape.

​I’ll keep experimenting.

#

Dear Diary,
​Spots getting closer. If I blink, they retreat. Blinking breaks up shape. Want to see the shape. Don’t want spots to touch me. Need to decide.

Samantha Lienhard decided that she wanted to be an author when she was in second grade, and she has been writing ever since. For years, she claimed to dislike horror, but dropped the pretense when it became too absurd to be believed. Her publications include "White Lady," a short ghost story, Sacreya's Legacy, a zombie serial, The Accidental Zombie, a comedy novella, The Book at Dernier, a horror serial, and "A Special Present," a romance story that somehow snuck in. When she isn't writing, she is probably reading or playing video games.You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, and her website.

About the Word Wood

A place to house our haphazard collection of flash fiction.

Every month, just for laughs, we ladies play a story game. We each pick a verb and a noun then throw them into a hat and pick a random combination. We roll a die and the winner gets to choose the genre. With everything settled we then attempt to write a piece of flash fiction, no more than 500 words, incorporating the bizarre wordage in the selected genre style.

If you enjoy reading these half as much as we enjoyed writing them then all is right with the universe.

February's Wordage

Noun: napeVerb: grunt

What's Flash Fiction?

Flash fiction is a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category. Some self-described markets for flash fiction impose caps as low as three hundred words, while others consider stories as long as a thousand words to be flash fiction. - Wikipedia